Cherryfield.netUsing your camera as a "Scanner"

You can use a high-resolution digital camera as a scanner. It may not be highest print quality for text, but if you zoom in it should be good enough for most purposes. It will almost always be good enough for photos.

Works best if your camera is at least 3 or 4 mega-pixels. Tips:

Use your highest resolution setting.

Because you will be close, use your macro setting.

Be sure you have lots of light. (Even in auto mode this will give you more depth of field and make the focus less critical.

Keep your camera as parallel to what you are copying as possible. (Using a tripod is best, but most of the simpler ones will not allow you to shoot straight down.)

Be careful that you don't get glare from the flash ... turn it off if you have enough natural light. (Bright artificial light will probably work better than your flash, but you may need to change the "white balance" setting.)

Experiment! ... it may take a few tries and you can't tell from looking at a picture on your camera ... you need to view it actual size on your computer.

Here are some samples: first a page which was scanned from a Cruise Brochure ...

A photo of the same page (notice the curve on the top because the page wasn't as flat as when pressed against the scanner glass) ...

The the scan was done at 300 d.p.i. and the original file before cropping of the over-scan was 2544 x 3508 pixels and 2.3 MB in size. The original photo (using a 6 mega-pixel camera) before cropping of the over-shoot (which you can see I didn't do very well) was 1960 x 3008 and 2.7 MB in size. The page samples above were reduced to 625 x 800 and (using high compression, ACDSee quality 15) are just 68 KB in size. (Although these don't look to bad on your screen, these low resolution versions wouldn't look that good if printed ... especially the text.)

As you can see in full resolution sections below, the type in the scanned images is crisper but the photographed image isn't all that bad. They both look pretty good when printed ... in fact I couldn't tell the difference between the entire pages when I printed the full resolution versions. The photos are much faster to take and the camera is a lot easier to carry with you than a computer and scanner.

To better see the quality of both images compare these sections, all of which are at the original resolution and saved with an ACDSee quality of 85 ... these sections are all 800 pixels wide and roughly 240 KB in size.